Project: Electrical wholesaler’s e-commerce business transformation

Electrical wholesaler MMEM Electrical Merchandising (MMEM) has a network of over 200 branches across Australia and, in recent years, has increased its product portfolio to over 130,000 products supplied to around 3000 electrical and data cabling contractors, industrial maintenance providers, builders and commercial contractors with everything from wiring accessories to motor-control devices, test equipment, cables, ducting, circuit protection and security systems.

MMEM recently complemented its physical branch network with a major expansion in its e-commerce capabilities to service organisations needing to trade online from anywhere, anytime.

Historically, MMEM was restricted by its hard-copy catalogues being immediately outdated once printed, customer service only addressing requests during business hours and its inability to showcase the full complement of products, thereby impeding MMEM’s goal of customer service excellence.

To facilitate sales growth and an e-commerce transformation away from print catalogues, MMEM undertook a comprehensive market evaluation for a technology provider and turned to ComOps for its ‘e-Com’ product suite that enables organisations to automate and integrate ordering systems and supply chains. In the evaluation process, MMEM required vendors to demonstrate their capability of handling at least one million transactions per month.

“We decided to implement ComOps’s e-Com solution, building on the successes we had from previous ComOps deployments,” said Trevor Batten, MMEM IT Manager. “This included ComOps’s UNIBIS enterprise resource planning and BI business intelligence solutions that enable us to create dashboards to report on the business. Both solutions were delivered on time and in budget. We knew we could work well with ComOps and that its technology solutions were capable of handling large amounts of data.

“We were also impressed with ComOps’s experience and methodology. We had confidence in their team’s technical skills and professional approach to integrate our existing ERP and BI platforms with their e-Com solution.”

Branded as Cat@list, MMEM’s web-based catalogue harvests the e-Com architecture to provide disparate ERP, web-based and internal applications which can interrogate and communicate end-to-end business processes and document flows online. e-Com can accommodate the transmission of orders, invoices, acknowledgements and remittance advices. It can also receive encrypted documents in multiple delivery methods, while the e-Gateway feature allows MMEM to define the processing rules and practices for each of their trading partners.

“The e-commerce implementation evolved over several years,” continued Batten. “As part of the planning, it was critical that the master file, images, pricing and search criteria were properly managed and implemented. It was critical for customers to see online the same information that our customer-service team does, including product specifications, pricing and images.”

The extensibility of the initial e-Com design proved a key element in MMEM’s success with major contracts, enabling close integration of the e-commerce platform with the procurement systems of its customers.

Customers can order any time from the online catalogue, with access to customised price lists that reflect their individual business arrangements, without having to call customer service.

“Our pricing is very complex, but ComOps handles this easily,” added Batten. “Clients download their individual pricing in a format which their own system requires and then place orders, which again supports their own web-interfaced procurement application.”

The system can handle 30,000 customers at any time, but new customers can also apply for accounts online with each application routed to the appropriate branch manager to review and approve the application.

One of the biggest concerns expressed by customers is not knowing the status of their back orders. To supplement current procedures and reports, MMEM made customer back orders viewable online, allowing users to instantly check the status of their back orders.

Although the catalogue is seen as an industry benchmark, ComOps’s ongoing relationship with MMEM is enabling it to continually add functionality and expand its e-commerce functionality for its customers’ benefit.

Batten pointed out that “as competition increases, our customers’ buying habits change. They now require more from suppliers, including automated procurement and increased functionality. Ultimately, ComOps enables us to energise our sales with one of the most advanced e-commerce sites in Australia and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with them.

“Cat@list will continue to be a destination of choice for our customers, enabling us to incorporate cross-sell and up-sell capability across our brands and handle new product acquisitions with ease, well into the future.”